Sunbox annual 2,669, biennial 2,631 kWh. Halted by the long time of no action in May-June.

Ground Temperature 12.7ºC. This went up to 13.1ºC last weekend (9th) with some sunny weather, but the rest of the week was rather cool.

9 June: This is the week of no solar capture earlier, but I got the Teepiece fitted later in the week and got the system working. There have been some sunny days, including the weekend, so the ground temperature jumped to 13.1º on Sunday evening. During the summer, it's not really worth posting figures every week as there is so little electric consumption by the house or heat pump that there is not much change. June 2012 was grimly cloudy and rainy, so we will see how the figures improve. June 2013 has started well.
World news wise.... it was the 60th anniversary of the Queen's Coronation - more horse parades. In the same week, the Queen opened the new BBC headquarters in Portland Place. The Turkish crisis rolls on with the occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul. Syria dominates the news too with Qusair being recovered by the government.
The story of global phone tapping has been broken by the Guardian. Who can be surprised that the NSA in US and UK government were performing statistical analysis on trillions of phone calls, emails and messages, Facebook and Google requests and all? With all the worries about global terrorism, and security, this seems inevitable. They claim that they do not read the contents specifically (unless keywords are used), mostly it is to check the linkages and frequency. We shall see.
Tom Sharpe, novelist, died, and Nelson Mandela is looking dodgy having been admitted to hospital yet again with respiratory infection. Surely they can let him die in peace? LondonDerry (Northern Ireland) has been voted European City of Culture and had a large ceremony - it seems better to do this in June than to do it on 1st of January, as did Liverpool a few years back - having a large music festival in January in bitter winter winds coming off the Irish sea was a bit difficult.
As an oddity, a man in Bolivia got what many see as a deserved end - buried alive. I am not sure if this was an officially sanctioned punishment, or villagers doing their thing. Having raped and murdered a woman, he was in custody, and the grave was dug. He was flung into the open grave and the coffin of the woman lowered onto him, and the grave filled in. It says something about the culture that rape is punished in this way, compared with some countries where a raped woman is ostracised or even killed because she is no longer 'pure'.
Sportswise, Rafa Nadal won the French Open Tennis for eighth time, and Vettel won the Formula One in Montreal.
For the Peveril Solar house, it is only worth publishing numbers every two weeks, as little changes during the summer.2 June 2013: The month of June has started with very good weather, and it is frustrating that the Sunbox system is not burying solar heat while it remains out of use. I am waiting for one solitary Tee piece. The first one arrived from Anablep but it was the wrong size, a 30-30-30 when I want a 38-38-38 tee piece. I am still waiting for the right ones to arrive. It will only take an hour to fix up, and yet lovely days of sunshine are passing by!
The ground temperatures chart below is interesting. With negligible heat being drawn up by the heat pump (a tiny bit of hot water only), and no solar heat being put down either, we seem to have settled on a stable summer temperature of about 12.4-12.5ºC. The Sunboxes have been out of use since the scaffolding went up, and while they were working there was a rapid upward acceleration of the ground temperature from 10.6 to 12.5º.

House annual 5,460, biennial 5,209 kWh. Annual dropping very slowly.

GSHP annual 3,459, biennial 3,203 kWh. Ditto..

PV annual 3,026, biennial 3,148 kWh. Very static.

Sunbox annual 2,666, dropping fast because nothing is being put down.

Ground Temperature 12.4ºC. This seems to represent the summer norm (for this time of year) if nothing much is being put down or taken up. (I would expect it to rise with natural warming to 12.8º by July if the sunbox is not repaired.)

World News? Turkey has come from nowhere to be the biggest story, with the proposal to build a shopping mall (using a pastiche Ottoman style) over Gezi Park in Taksim Istanbul. A peaceful occupation of the park (to save the trees) turned nasty when the police over-reacted, inflicting excessive punishment over the tree-savers. In a more unexpected place, Stockholm has been suffering from riots, youth unemployment, especially in the immigrant communities has spilled over into violence. Beloved actor Bill Pertwee (Hodges of Dad's Army) died. It was the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring and of the death of Emily Wilding Davison, who leapt fatally in front of the Kings Horse at Ascot.

March 2015: Work on the solar dehydrator has been progressing well, and it is nearly complete, lacking merely the top surface of the sola...

Peveril Solar House

Welcome to Charging the Earth!

PEVERIL SOLAR is the first house in the UK to be entirely solar heated all year round! It is Carbon Net-Zero. It is an 'Active House' balancing inputs and outputs. PV generation and heating system consumption are in favourable balance using concepts of energy storage. Others claiming houses to be the first date from 2013 (and are unbuilt); this house exists and was carbon zero since 2011.

The name 'Charging' refers to 'storing energy underground': we have custom-built solar collectors, Surya Sunboxes, with ETFE front surfaces, to pump solar heat deep down into the earth. The building's heat pump gets all of this back in Realtime (immediately), Diurnially (later during the evenings) or Interseasonally (in Winter, months after the Summer).

Thus, we are augmenting the heatpump by storing long term heat in the summer, and we are defrosting the ground in winter-spring conditions, supplying solar energy directly to the heat pump, through its ground loop.

The five-way pentangle of Grid, Borehole, Heat pump, PV roof and Sunboxes have made the house Carbon Zero (for metered consumption). It's working, and we will continue to record data, to maintain that efficiency, and write it up in this website through to next year and beyond.

During theAutumn of 2012, we built a small house extension that is ultra insulated, with a higher energy gain than it loses.

Note, that we still have a net import of power from the Grid, because we still need power for lighting, cooking and appliances. But for the building emissions (as opposed to lifestyle emissions), we have achieved a credit balance of the regulated quantities, as recorded by meters.

The web-log follows the project from this general idea in Aug. 2009 to a technology of Surya Sunboxes, which seem to be effective - reducing energy costs of the house. Some of the Tabs will help you to get background and theory. You can click below to 'Follow Blog' to get email notifications - or email me. Please add Comments to the blog entries. If you find items in the Glossary that need explaining better, please ask. Thankyou!

Publications

Equipment sponsor

Kingspan, for Varisol Tubes

Equipment Sponsor

MG Renewables

Equipment sponsor

Ice Energy Heat Pumps

Equipment Sponsor

Holscot, for ETFE panels, re-fronting the Sunbox

About the Author...

David Nicholson-Cole is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Nottingham, with 35 years experience of architectural teaching and practice, which has included special interests in construction, building information modelling, tall building design and renewable energy technologies.

Finally, thanks to my deceased aunt, Margaret Cringle (1915-2008) whose legacy paid for most of the cost of this project - as one who was always turning lights out to save electricity, she would be very pleased!